


Don't Look Back Into The Sun

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Series: Rising Sun [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Emperor Hux, Emperor's Hand Ren, Force-Sensitive Hux, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 08:39:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7041145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Emperor has taken his throne, but not without price.</p><p>And now, Kylo Ren would have him pay it in full.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Look Back Into The Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Schaloime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schaloime/gifts).



> This story was a pinch hit, and the art is in progress. I've seen a sneak peek and I died. I'm writing this from beyond the grave. Check back soon, and you too will be dead like me. But it's quite nice here on the other side. I swear.
> 
> ETA: **THE ART IS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FIC** and I'm still dead. I'm so very dead. It's _amazing_. Please go tell [@schaloime](http://schaloime.tumblr.com/post/145871157271/dont-look-back-into-the-sun-by) how amazing the art is BECAUSE IT IS AMAZING and I am just so damn glad I put my hand up for a pinch hit and was able to be a part of such a wonderful piece of art. Just..holy shit goddamn, I can't even articulate how happy this makes me.
> 
> I also just want to say thank you to the moderators for putting together this amazing event, and while my contribution is small, I'm still glad to have been part of it. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone else's work, because this ship is destroying my life. Ha. <3

_Upon the catwalk of one of the great observatories Hux stood alone, dark sleek silhouette against star-riddled black. The Finalizer was not a pleasure ship, had been designed neither for beauty nor for idle contemplation. But she was the flagship of the fleet: a masterwork of technology and design. As her commander, Hux felt entitled to indulge himself. At such great distance even the chaotic spill of the galaxy appeared orderly and true. Alone at her helm, Hux could feel the power that would make it so, given time enough._

_The approach of the other came quiet, but in such contemplative silence Hux could not help but hear him. Still, it only happened because Ren allowed it. Hux knew that, and he also knew it could not be a function of the other’s man deplorable sense of decorum; though raised amongst politicians, Kylo Ren seemed to have taken more of his manners from the smuggler’s blood tainting his veins. But Ren could have come to him with no audible announcement at all. Hux couldn’t help but resent that he should be expected to be grateful for something as petty as all that._

_“What are you doing here?” The question came clear and quick, demanding immediate answer though Hux wished no conversation with the other man. But Hux would not have Ren lurking in shadow and in silence. It seemed only sensible to strike pre-emptively, to send the fool back to whence he had come with sharp tongue and sharper words._

_But Ren held his silence, and his place at Hux’s side. With hands tightly furled at the small of his back, Hux began counting stars. The recital was orderly, even, the cadence a military beat. He had moved deep into triple figures before Ren bothered to interrupt._

_“It was the first time.”_

_Hux finished out his cluster before pursing his lips, eyes narrowed yet. “Excuse me?”_

_“Today. It was the first time I’ve ever seen you speak in person.”_

_His fingers creaked in the warm leather of his gloves; beneath the black, his knuckles had turned white and taut. His latest speech to the gathered masses upon Starkiller base had been earlier that morning, the air chill and his voice high-pitched and carrying across that winter-bound white stillness._

_“I see.”_

_“I was…surprised.”_

_Scoffing now, Hux forced his hands and their roughened palms to relax. Still he wondered why he bothered. Even if he stood at ease, the air between them had turned thick and choking, the taste of ash and ozone coiled at the back of his throat. “Surely you’ve seen the propo-holos before. It’s regulation to – oh, wait. Do excuse me. You’re above regulations. I had quite forgotten.”_

_“No, I have seen them.” Ren’s voice held the edge of true petulance, deep enough that even the vocoder could not conceal it. “I was…impressed.”_

_At last Hux turned to him; an eyebrow, arched high, hung heavy over the scepticism writ upon still features. “I see,” he said, again, the glacial tone as cold as the vacuum that was their shared view. “Am I to be flattered, then?”_

_Ren had turned his own attention back towards the great viewport. Given that the impossible man had resumed his black silence, Hux could not gauge his mood; the ridiculous mask only made such efforts all the more infuriating. Returning his own gaze to his favoured systems, Hux stared through the thin ghost of his own reflection and snorted._

_“Although I suppose it would be questionable to take to heart the opinion of a person who uses a vocal modulator to make their own speech more interesting.”_

_Said voice rumbled low, warning: the sound of distant storm over high jagged mountain. “That is not why I use it.”_

_“Oh.” He’d been told he had a pleasant smile. Hux meant it to be anything but when he replied, light and conversational, “My mistake, then.”_

_In answer, the gloved hands rose; with a hiss of unseen hydraulics, the mouthpiece released and Ren removed the ungainly helmet. Though a rare enough occurrence, it was not the first time Hux had seen him unmasked. But something in the man’s eyes crawled beneath Hux’s skin, set off the low carol of an emergency siren at the back of his mind._

_Ren appeared_ fascinated _– but it had been tainted with something deeper, something darkening. It seemed close to curiosity, though perhaps more like hunger; certainly it could be named as some form of desire, one that Hux had not thought Ren capable of. As far as Hux had ascertained, Ren saw himself as something removed from others: as someone above the entire crew of both the star destroyer and the base she served. That number included Hux himself. A grudging and thin respect would be all that he could expect from such a man._

_But this was something else entirely. Those dark damned eyes seemed to swallow Hux whole even as Ren smiled, strange and vicious delight cast across upon a face now more mask than even his damned helmet._

_“You don’t know, do you.”_

_Instinct told him to take a step backward. Hux held his ground. Ren had called him a master of simulations, a chair-bound gamemaster who knew not the reality of the pieces he moved upon his unseen board. But Hux had never asked of his subordinates what he would not have done himself – had that been his duty. “What you are blathering on about?” he asked, lips pursed and hands too tightly curled. “But no. It would appear I don’t know this thing you’re referring to. I’m not certain I should care.”_

_“No,” Ren mused, as if Hux had not spoken at all. “No, you truly don’t_ know _.” His gaze had turned hazy, half-dreaming in sudden intrigue. Those dark eyes, so large in his elongated features, now caught and held the bright reflection of the starfield beyond the transparisteel. As he tilted his head in distant contemplation, near-black hair shifted about the pale face; given it was the same dull colour as these tempered shadows, it made it appear as if Ren bled into them, was born of them._

_“Ren.” Hux’s stance remained military-tight, eyes sharpened to blue storm-blade. “Either cease being cryptic and conduct this conversation like the adult you reputedly are, or leave me be.”_

_“General.” Somehow, in the space of mere seconds, Ren had come very close. Too close. His breath ghosted warm against Hux’s own chill, while the dark eyes felt to strip back skin and muscle and bone to leave intact only the soul within. Before him Hux felt bared and strange and hurting, and he could but strike back in return._

_“Get out of my head.”_

_Ren’s eyes flared, dimmed. He did not look away. “I’m not in it.”_

_“Then what are you doing to me?”_

_“I’m seeing you.” The wonder in it trembled at Hux’s very core, for all his body stayed utterly still. This man held all the terrifying beauty of a black hole: its great mass unseen, felt only by influence. So easy it could twist reality about its centre, a terrible power that reached far beyond what should have been logical. And when he smiled, Hux could not help but take his first step back._

_The grin grew wider, whiter, and Ren only stepped forward to match his every retreat. “For the first time. I_ see _you.”_

 _One hand rose, gloved palm outward, as if that could have had power enough to stop a creature such as this. “_ Ren _.”_

 _Relentless, Ren pursued him halfway across the observatory; the air about him shimmered as if charged, brought to brilliant life by Ren’s growing clear delight. Hux had never been able to predict the future. No-one had such power, not even those of Ren’s own cursed kind. And yet in that moment Hux_ knew _what he would say. And he wanted nothing so much as to strike out, to make him bleed, to make him_ stop _._

_“You have the Force in you, Brendol Hux.” With the stars haloed about his dark head, Ren halted at last, this dark herald of cruel tidings. Upon his face was a child’s open wonder, his smile a charmed and merry thing. “Don’t be afraid.” A hand bridged what little space remained between them, open and inviting. “I can help you.”_

_Hux’s own hands stayed locked at the small of his back: pushing forward, forcing him upright even when his knees felt fit to buckle, some fundamental structure of his mind bent to breaking. “You need to leave.”_

_Ren only shook his head, his faint amusement both terrible and strange; it was the joy of a young boy given an unexpected gift, one unasked for and yet so long and so desperately desired. “I always thought there was something odd about you,” he mused as if to himself, though his damned demanding eyes never once left Hux’s own. “I thought it was just because you’re the only person I’ve met in the Order who doesn’t fear me.”_

_He smiled even as he felt his face crack beneath the strain of such false calm, his insides a churning mess of denial and despair. “And why should I fear you?”_

_“Why should you, indeed.” Ren’s tongue moved out, flicked over his lips; impossibly, his own smile grew wider yet. “I should have realised. You can block me. So few people can block me.”_

_Aching, wishing only to turn and to run and to hide, Hux did none of these things. He had left those child’s whims long behind, even when he had been young enough to count as one. “And yet, you are still here,” he said, voice breaking not at all. And Ren’s answering laugh was low, rolling, rumbling, the echo of distant thunder in unseen skies._

_“I used to think perhaps Snoke had taught you some rudimentary skill. You are his pet general, after all.”_

_Anger, familiar and fundamental, flooded him in welcome deluge. “How_ dare _you.”_

_“Just a pet,” he said, and something in that damned voice felt to be laughing. “But I was wrong. You’re so much more than that.”_

_“I won’t have you coming in here and insulting—”_

_“That’s why they listen to you,” he said, his own voice smooth and knowing and so very terrible in what even Hux could not deny as truth. Logic had always been the cruellest mistress of all, and Ren gave her full access to the darkest facts as he said, “You don’t realise it. You never did. But every word you say, you speak it with the Force.” This time when a hand rose, Ren came terribly close to laying it upon one cheek. Only by dint of great stubborn frustration did Hux not flinch away when it hovered there, but a moment before cruel touch. And there was wonder in Ren’s words, something dangerously close to pure admiration when he whispered, “And then they_ hear _it.”_

_Hux stared him down. Pitiful, perhaps, to cling to past truths when they had already been made lies in his own heart. But then, his heart had always been slaved to his mind. “That is called years of oratory training.”_

_“Yes.” But something dreadfully close to joy moved upon those mobile features even in the face of such protest, eyes ablaze and cheeks taking on strange high flush. “And no,” Ren added; his sigh came soft, a low hum of startled aroused interest. “You fear so little, General. Why should you then fear this?”_

_“I am uninterested—”_

_“But_ I _am interested.” Again, his fingers hovered too close; even through the thick leather of his gloves, Hux felt their heat upon his skin like sun and flame. “I suppose Snoke knows – he knows, and thinks you no threat to him. It’s just a small and occasionally useful part of you. To him.”_

_Hux wished for nothing more than for this conversation to have never happened. But he could not let such insult pass. “I am not small.”_

_“No. You are not.” Ren laughed, a strange and unpractised sound; it grated against Hux’s ears like a saber over durasteel. “But there is much we could offer each other.” Ren’s eyes, so very black without the reflected stars, were insatiable upon him, demanding and delighted both. “I want_ you _.”_

_But Hux could not break now. Not yet. Not here. “Get out.”_

_“It’s too late.” And in that dreadful closeness Ren leaned forward; his lips drifted against the skin of Hux’s forehead in benevolent gift, smiling and warm and unforgiving in the moments before he turned away. “No, General. I’m already in.”_

 

*****

 

The Mon Calamari senator exhausts him. Hux still smiles, converses as easily as he moves, and wonders why the heat of the noon sun hasn’t sent the thing squidging back to the imperial palace in search of a water feature to drown itself in.

Such unease is heavy, uncharacteristic. He’d thought to have chained the sharp black demons of anxiety many a year ago, but upon occasion they slip their bonds, disordering the clean lines of his thoughts and mind entire. He can mask it from said senator, but his hands clench tight in the fine leather of his gloves, and his cheeks ache from the forced gentility of the words passed between them.

It had not been that way that morning. Then, Hux had taken his place upon the dais before his people, and the familiar words had flowed with the ease of cold clear water. But even as they had drunk deep of him, thirsting and thoughtless, bitter truth had taken the joy of it from Hux. _Ren_ had taken the joy of it from him, that long ago night upon the _Finalizer_. The Force lurks within him, untutored and untaught – and Hux, never a man to deny a useful tool, employs it without even knowing the nature nor strength of the power he draws upon.

He could still deny it. He _does_ still deny it. But Hux feels it anyway: that surge of power which rises from deep within every time he stands before the gathered masses. It turns every pair of eyes turns to him. It commands the ordering of their minds, aligns them to his cause. Their hearts fall into in his hand with every rising word: beating and bleeding and _brilliant_.

Some part of Hux had always known it to be more than simple oratorical skill. But he has worked for this. It is not a gift, freely given, callously accepted as simply his due. Ren will speak of destiny, but Hux deals only in cause and effect. In this he draws upon the absolutes of logic he has known his whole life. There is something inside of him and he cares not for what Ren would have it be. It matters now only what it is.

The conversation now mercifully limps towards its end, though the inevitable invitation that will follow leaves Hux inwardly cursing: he knows the senator would very much like for the emperor to join him upon a terrace for tea. A loathed ritual, wasteful of resources and patience alike, but the alliance is a necessary one. Mon Cala had not bowed easily to the new Empire, and amongst their people lurk many prominent Republic personnel. The senator himself hedges his bets, balancing his loyalties upon a bright knife edge. How Hux longs to gut him with said blade, and then make of him brutal bleeding example.

But here he is emperor, not general. This is a place of deft politics, not blaster bolts to the back of bowed heads.

The invitation never comes. Instead, a shadow moves across his mind, strong and strange; alert, searching, Hux turns from the senator even as the Mon Calamari still speaks. The gardens are spread out around them as a fine tapestry of green and gold and riotous rainbow colour, and at the apex of three paths Hux finds his quarry: a solitary figure, his singular presence sharply at odds with the small retinue of staff and guards attendant upon emperor and senator.

Ren’s arrival comes as no surprise whatsoever. But Hux can pretend.

The senator has fallen to blessed silence when Hux turns back to him, expression carefully bland. “If you will excuse me, Senator, but I must take my leave.” His smile is cool and light, more military than diplomatic. “My Hand is returned to me, and I must debrief him.”

The large liquid eyes are watchful, curious, too bright by half. “Of course, your majesty,” he burbles, though Hux certainly does not wait to be dismissed. He is the one who turns away at will, greatcoat flaring about his calves. It is white, now, save in its embellishments of ebony and crimson; splendid and orderly, a uniform of both highest office and most regal purpose.

But Ren is clad entirely in shades of utilitarian black. Both his attire and entire presence are far more ordered than what he had worn in the days of Snoke: fitted smooth leather moves sleek and silent beneath a hooded cloak, and he wears no helmet. There is no need to hide his past, when all that matters now is the present they have made for themselves in the ruins of the New Republic.

“Ren.” Hux bows his head not at all, manages even to look down his aristocratic nose though Ren stands several inches taller. “I had not realised your command shuttle had returned.”

Those peculiar features remain unmoving, the words low and almost inflectionless. Ren always knows when he lies. “I have been planetside since this morning.”

_And you did not come to me._

The only tell of Hux’s unease is in his blink, slow and singular. Coruscant is bigger than the _Finalizer_ , and even as emperor he cannot wield control over every single aspect of the monstrous city’s functioning. It still burns that no-one has told him of Ren’s return. Even though he already knew. “You were to report to me upon arrival.”

There comes the slightest hint of a smile, curling at one corner of his lips; it vanishes almost as quickly as it had come. “You were preparing for your latest speech, and we were earlier than our projected time.”

With no need to mask his own disgust, Hux snorts. He had felt Ren in the crowd. Even when he had refused to so much as glance in his direction, those dark eyes had never once looked away from him. “I trust, then, you were at least successful in your mission?”

“Indeed.”

“Good.”

It is unlike them both: Hux, to not demand detail, and Ren, not to offer more than Hux might ever care to know. Though they are not alone in the gardens, they might as well be; the others who move through hedges and paths are as pale silhouettes to the brilliance of one another, bit players upon the stage they have taken for themselves.

But the lie remains uneasy between them. Hux had felt Ren’s approach that morning in the same way he had always known the coming of rains upon Arkanis; he could scent it, sense it upon the air, fresh and strange and changing. But then, on Arkanis, it had almost always been raining.

As Ren never really leaves him, even when he is gone.

Ren walks too close now. From beneath even the shadows of his cowl, the dark eyes rest unblinking upon him. There’s an unspoken demand there; something owed then, which must be now repaid. Hux says nothing, hands folded at the small of his back, the parade stance as perfect as it ever was.

Eventually Ren tilts his head, opens the next scene between them. Hux has never really become accustomed to his voice without the vocal modulator, deep and rolling and so odd in its cadence and pause. “I watched your speech.”

The bland smile becomes tremulous at its edges; Hux remembers all too well the result of the first speech Ren had ever stirred himself to watch. “I do hope you learned something from it.”

“It was most educational,” Ren says, odd and agreeable as he is only when first come home. “Though perhaps not in the way you intended.”

His skin prickles, cold and uneasy even in the warmth of the gardens. “What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

Though Hux pays no heed to those people around them even now, he arches an eyebrow, voice cool. “Is this the place to be discussing such matters?”

“You thought of it.” Ren blinks; it does nothing to dull the rich magnetism of his too-large eyes. “Earlier.”

Anger seeps through his thoughts then: red-hot and sharp, desperate to bury itself into some warm vulnerable spot of flesh until he could make it scream. But Hux has never allowed such emotion to rule him. Not as it once had Kylo Ren himself. “Was that your influence?” he asks, tight, utterly controlled. And Ren huffs a short breath, closer to frustration than the easy fury from days of old.

“No.” It is as if he speaks to a child when he says, careful and cajoling, “It is the will of the Force. We have time, now.”

This surge of anger is blinding, though he never once breaks eye contact with Ren himself. “No.”

“ _Yes_.” It is a compulsion, but one resisted; Ren has never been able to make Hux do anything he did not wish to. And now Ren shifts closer, his great hulking body suddenly seeming three sizes bigger than ever before. “You have put this off too long.” The tone is insisting, enticing, demanding. “It must be dealt with. _Now_.”

Hux closes his eyes. It costs them both just a moment. It’s still a weakness he curses himself for as he turns away, voice as tight as the fingers tangled behind his back. “Walk with me.”

They move together through the grand gardens of the Imperial Palace in a silence Hux makes no attempt to disrupt. It is still some surprise that Ren does not either – though these changes in him have been rapid, if not absolute. It does strike him as odd that Ren has never made any mention of the fact that this palace had once been the Jedi Temple. The ghost of his beloved grandfather surely haunts this place, though Hux himself cares little enough to learn of either that history, or such spirituality.

But the shrewdness to Ren’s eyes tells him that he knows Hux can feel it all the same: the leylines of power and Force, drawing together in welling node beneath this place. It is a gathering of great energy, a liminal place of change and potential. Upon his coronation, that same power had risen unchecked in his blood, pooling brilliant in his hear. In that moment, he had been as a new born god.

Hux had told himself it was but the overwhelming emotion of the moment; surely such unique emotion could only have been expected, given that not even his ascension to general had bestowed upon him such influence and raw power. But it could not have been excused by even the tantalising sight of Kylo Ren bowed before him: on one knee, bare dark head bent, burning saber laid before Hux’s white boots. What had burned in his veins then had been a different power entire.

And one all his own.

“You feel it still,” Ren murmurs, and Hux grimaces even as he does not miss a step.

“Well. From what you say, I cannot turn it off.”

For all Ren appears to be the darkest of fatalists, he sounds genuinely curious now. “Do you wish it turned off?”

Hux stares straight ahead, into the sun. “More than anything.”

The hurt this invokes upon Ren’s face goes unhidden – though Ren had never been skilled at schooling those expressive features. Even now, even after the death of his master gave him some kind of odd peace with himself, Ren cannot stop his face from betraying his every secret.

Hux openly stares even as Ren keeps his own eyes forward, turned up towards the sky. He is strong in profile: the long face, the too-prominent nose, the generous lips, the dark wide eyes in his pale mole-flecked skin. Everything in part, far from conventional; in combination, none of it should not have made sense. So much about Kylo Ren ought never to have made any sense, least of all to Hux himself.

“You’re staring.”

Hux scowls, fingers folding together before his hips as he looks away. “I most certainly am not.”

Now he hears rather than sees the quirk of lips, for all that ought to have been impossible. “You cannot run from this.”

“I am no coward.”

“I did not say you were,” and there is more weariness in his words than the goading of days long passed. “You do not fear it,” Ren adds, faint admiration buried almost completely beneath his frustration. “It simply does not align with your understanding of yourself.”

Truth has always been his favoured weapon, logic his most loyal companion. Hux shudders to feel then both now turned against him. “For someone who failed Jedi school,” he manages with false even grace, “you certainly sound like those dry old masters of yesteryear.”

One eyebrow arches high. “Have you been in the archives?”

Hux does not dignify such a question with any response whatsoever. Their matched steps speak instead to the inevitability of all this: they move together with not a beat missed. Everything has changed since those days upon the _Finalizer_ , before the rise and fall of Starkiller. The General and the Knight are gone. And yet they remain together, here in this place. Ren could have, _should_ have, left him long ago – after he had brought Hux the head of Snoke, dripping ichor and eyes still rolling in the misshapen sockets of his patchwork skull.

But in Hux, Ren had found something. Something he’d long been looking for. Something he’d never found anywhere else. They’d fucked there, high upon the dead creature’s throne, and Hux had tasted saltwater even beneath the rich tang of spilled alien blood.

They’ve never spoken of it again. He can’t imagine that they ever will.

“I simply cannot see the logic of it,” Hux says, at last, bright burst of irritation. There remains so much more to say, and no words with which to say any of it. The faint pressure upon his mind is frustrating as it is familiar: Ren, asking to be let in. Hux clamps down hard, stares ahead, walks with easy military purpose. And Ren sighs, never once missing a step as he falls back into place.

“Hux,” he says, as low and dark as those memories of a war fought and won, “Hux, I made this deal with you because of your potential.” When he chuckles, it is utterly without humour. “I know you well enough that you wouldn’t have simply _forgotten_ that.”

Hux says nothing more. But Ren does not leave him even when he comes to a pause upon one of the low bridges, staring out across the gardens. They are still not alone – they are never alone, here. Courtiers and politicians alike move through the great gardens like slow-paced embolisms in some great circulatory system, hushed and haughty amongst themselves. Hux would do anything to wash it clean with acid, to begin again, to make something noble and true of a system corrupted by both past and present.

The damned Mon Calamari senator catches his eye, lurching about the ornamental fish ponds of the eastern side. Hux’s hands roll to fists, knuckles creaking and white. This deep longing for a sniper rifle is an old one, familiar and fierce, and none the less urgent for age. It would be quick. Easy. Clean. And how much _neater_ it would be, to refuse to toady to the creature and instead install a puppet in his place – one without lingering loyalties to the dead Republic.

“You could do that with a blaster, yes,” Ren agrees, too close indeed. “But then, you could strike him at far greater a distance than this, with far more power, if you would but learn of your potential.” Lips brush against Hux’s ear, the words light and sweet and too warm. “It is far greater than even you can imagine, now.”

Jerking away, Hux resumes his earlier stance, eyes still upon the figures below. “Ren,” he says, his mind alight with fire. “What have I told you about reading my thoughts?”

Rather than recoil from the heat of Hux’s mind, Ren moves languid in his retreat. “What have I told you about learning to shield them so I might never catch even a stray one?”

“I haven’t the time.”

“There is always time.” Leaning forward upon the balustrade now, Ren’s eyes search across the gardens, and the city beyond the sharp delineation of its borders. His body is that of a reclining predator, long and deeply muscled, wrapped in dark leather. Hux turns his eyes from the shift of his back, the lazy incline of hips above the stance of powerful thighs. And Ren chuckles to himself, says too easy, “Allow me to come to you, tonight. We can…talk.”

Hux’s eyes are upon his city, and his thoughts forced to the work that lies before him. Such decadent corruption will take an entire reign to undo. “Yes,” he says, and the bitterness taints every word. “Because you and I, we _talk_ so very much.”

Ren continues on as if Hux had not spoken at all. “It would be easier for you, I think,” he muses, and then his eyes are upon him, raking over the body that is so different to the shape of the uniform that covers it. Hux must resist the urge to pull the greatcoat tight about himself as Ren adds, “Yes. I will come to you.”

“ _Ren_.”

The command of it draws only a mocking smile, head tilting as if he might drop that hulking body into some form of low curtsey. “Yes, your majesty?”

And he grimaces, hard and low. “Don’t say that.”

 _Don’t tease me_ , are the words neither of them say aloud. Ren’s eyes turn darkly amused, great body relaxed and lips curved dangerously close to a smile. “It’s your title, isn’t it?”

“Not to you.”

At the tight harshness of the words, Ren only nods, though the dark gleam of his eyes says he has taken this victory exactly as intended. “It is as we agreed,” he murmurs, voice velvet rich and dark: the seductive tones of a power not even Hux has ever desired. “You needed Snoke gone, as did I,” he then adds, soft and lovely. “Our desires aligned, then.”

“So why do you stay, now that he is gone?”

“Because my desires are not yet sated.” Their hands brush, upon the balustrade; Hux does not flinch away, no matter how much he might wish to. Ren’s eyes are large enough to fill the galaxy entire when he breathes the words as an invocation between them. “You made me a promise, General.”

In Hux’s dry throat, there is no room for speech. Those searching eyes take his again, demanding and desiring. It has returned: the taste of salt on his tongue, of blood on his lips, ash in his hair and upon his skin, and Hux can say nothing at all.

Ren’s new smile is a small and secret thing. “This evening, then.”

“And if I have prior engagements?” And how he wishes he could fist his hands in that cowl, bringing them nose to nose, prelude to a fight. Instead he stands, straight-backed and alone, and glares daggers into a man who now wears self-assurance like armour. “I am the _emperor_ , Ren. I cannot simply drop everything for _you_.”

“I’ll come late.” That ghost of a smile haunts yet his oddly austere features. “I know how seldom you sleep.”

Hux answers not, lips pressed to thin line as he turns away. But for all they call him the Starkiller, butcher of worlds, he has his honour. And he knows when a debt earned must be repaid in full.

 

*****

 

Even before Hux enters his chambers, he can feel Ren within. In truth he has always been able to sense him, a fact he had realised soon after their first meeting. In those days he had assumed that while it might seem preternatural, it had a logical enough explanation; from childhood Hux had been taught to be always hyperaware of those things that did not fit into his own worldview. But this has always been something more than that.

_We are bound together, you and I._

Those are old words, first whispered to him upon Snoke’s desecrated throne when naked limbs had wound about one another, lips tasting of blood and sweat and salt. But it had existed long before then. Hux has always known Ren’s presence. On that dreadful day when Snoke had sent him to the ruins of Starkiller, there had been no need for the tracking device. Even as the thing beeped active in his hand, Hux paid it little heed. Instead his unerring sense of _Ren_ had drawn him close – had drawn him near, though in some ways it had felt as though they had never been apart.

They have never spoken of it. But it stretches between them, a pulsing cord both bright and dark in its alien weave. Hux does not know if this is a common occurrence, or one unique to their own idiot situation. He has not quite dared to research it, for all his throne stands upon the archives of thousands of years of Jedi lore.

It is not that he fears the answer. It is more that he already knows there isn’t one.

“Hux.”

“Ren.”

Titles are but rarely used between them – holdover of a promise made between two men at a time that now seems so long ago. In childhood Hux had dreamed of an imperial throne; Ren, of a centre to his own wildly unanchored self. While Ren has never said so, Hux can sense that Snoke had found a willing host in a young boy simply because Ben Solo, son of heroes and revolutionaries, had been so damn _lonely_.

But Ben Solo had been not only lonely. He’d also been possessed of a power that once dwarfed and frightened him. Only when he’d become Kylo Ren, this great hulking beast with crossguard saber to hand, had that power come under his control. And then, when Hux had neared the height of his own powers amongst the Order with Starkiller almost at completion, Ren had come to him in the night to seek that which he has craved all his life.

The whispered words remain emblazoned upon his mind. _I need no master, now_ , Ren had told him, words given into the dark and the silence. _But without the Force, you are of no use to me. I can bring you his head, and you might bring the whole galaxy beneath your heel. But you must give yourself to me, as I give myself to you. And there is only one path open to us now. If we are to be equals. If we are to be what is asked of us._

Hux has never spoken of it to another. He knows they wonder why Ren remains at his side, bows his knee to the emperor after slaying his former master in Hux’s name. Why Ren will leave at the Emperor’s biding to quell uprisings. Why Ren will take his skirmishes across the galaxy before returning home to Coruscant, when Hux is known to have no patience for the Force, nor for mystics and esoteric mysteries alike.

But Snoke had made a terrible miscalculation in bringing them together. As strong as he himself had been, the once-Supreme Leader must have known of Hux’s potential, though he apparently had had no use for Hux in full Force. The insidious power of his general had proven tool enough, that magnetism of personality combined with the sheer strength of indomitable will. Hux had not become the master of their propaganda ceremonies for no reason.

But it seems Snoke had believed that had Ren sensed the quiescent Force in Hux, such knowledge would have fostered only resentment and rivalry. Certainly Hux knows of Ren’s history, where he had cut down so many of his own kind in order to be the best of them.

But Ben Solo had been such a lonely child.

And Kylo Ren wanted an equal. And in Brendol Hux, he had found the only person in the galaxy he believed worth enough to bring order to the chaos of his own vast power.

They stand together now in the quiet of Hux’s morning chamber; the long windows are draped in thick curtains, blood red and edged in rich black. The night beyond, Hux knows, is choked with artificial light and noise pollution. Never has he so missed the familiar order of the starfields as seen from the _Finalizer’s_ great viewports.

“I must finish what he started.” Ren has come too close, again, standing to his side with head bent close to his ear. In these days, he is always too close. “This is the only way,” he adds, and there is apology but no pity offered before him now. “There can be no balance if you deny the truth of who you are.”

Hux closes his eyes, as if that could have any chance at all of blinding him. “I am but one man.”

“You are the Emperor.” In Ren’s voice, the statement is sympathetic, soft. “And through you, I can build a new order.” His voice now turns low, hoarse, carefully probing. “But only if you will lead the way.”

Hux has no words. That cannot surprise him, not when there is nothing there he might conceivably deny. He had first known Ren in the days before he had found his purpose, his path. The ruin of him under Snoke’s influence had seemed absolute; the change in him now is catastrophic in that he has been put entirely back together.

Though Hux has enough self-respect to know he will never himself be as Ren was, he cannot help but rage against this soft erosion of his self-understanding. Rigid self-control might only do so much, when such unfathomable power beats so constantly against the weathered buttresses of even his solid-walled mind.

Ren does not pluck these thoughts from his head, though Hux might have permitted it. But then he does not need to. In this strange relationship they understand more of one another than either might care to admit. Though Ren has always been far easier in his acceptance of the unknown, of the madness. In even his bitter knowledge of the Force, Ren has taken odd peace with its constant presence in his life. Hux knows his path will never take that same turn.

“Give me a moment, to prepare.” As he turns away Hux’s smile is mocking, cracked, and he does not even know who he laughs at. “I should be comfortable for this, yes?”

Hux spends long moments in the refresher, an indulgence he would never have taken as general. It should be uncomfortable, knowing that Ren lurks in the other room while he is made vulnerable in this way. But that odd calm Ren now wears is not that pregnant pause before the tempest breaks, as it had been before. This is instead genuine in its watchfulness: the encapsulated chaos of a planetary-wide weather system, where all possibilities of destruction and creation are made one, balanced in true equilibrium.

When Hux returns he wears soft sleeping clothes, damp hair curling about his neck, thick robe cinched tight about a narrow waist. No-one else might see him this way – but then Ren himself does not either. With eyes closed he has long since seated himself upon the floor of the morning room, barefoot and dressed only in trousers and tunic. From the doorway that leads back to his bedchamber, Hux observes this deep oddity: Kylo Ren in perfect peaceful meditation. So many things have changed, but that is the only thing Hux might never have been able to actively imagine.

“You don’t need to look at me like that.” Ren speaks in a manner deceptively mild, eyes yet closed. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

With arms crossed tight over his chest, Hux does not surrender the higher position. “Did I say anything to indicate I thought that was the case?”

“Hux.”

It is no order – nor even a request, precisely. Huffing out an exasperated breath, Hux crosses the room, lowering himself; it takes long moments to arrange himself before Ren, cross-legged and uncomfortable upon the cool tile of the floor. “Under the circumstances,” he says, if only to break the silence, “you should likely just call me Brendol.”

Ren’s brow, above those closed eyes, furrows deep. The name has always sounded peculiar upon his lips. But Hux knows not what else would sound better. That knowledge lurks somewhere just out of his reach. The frustration of that is a hard and hurtful thing; as a child about his lessons, when Hux had not immediately known an answer he had still known where he might go to locate it. In this, he is blind, hands bound, deaf and mute in everything but ignorance.

When Ren’s eyes open, the dark smudges beneath them are well suited to the black hollow of their irises. “Hux,” he says, instead, and shakes his head. “You’re tensing up, again.”

“I’m tired.” Hux smiles then, charming and cold, two sides of the same dulled coin. His hands are still fists upon the floor. “I also don’t want to do this.”

Ren, once the very epitome of childish tantrum, is unmoved. “This is important.”

“So are a thousand other things I could be doing.” And then, before Ren can even think to scold him, Hux adds with reckless guile, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be difficult.”

A raised eyebrow is all the surprise Hux earns. Laughter twists low in his gut, desperate and merry. He keeps it to himself, even when he knows he is hardly his own person, anymore.

“And don’t _stare_ at me like that. I know when I’m in the wrong.” Any levity is long gone now, his face pale and composed and tranquil in its withheld fury. “I made an agreement with you. I will honour it. Don’t drag this out, I want to go to bed sometime before dawn.”

When Ren sighs, the disappointment on his face is a palpable and terrible thing. “It’s not so much about honour, than it is about truth,” he offers, like a sheathed blade. “I’m not doing this only for myself.”

Hux cannot keep the scepticism to himself. “I see.”

“This truth is in you,” Ren insists, and again that creeping crawling sense of disappointment trembles low in his gut, a childhood memory of a father who had never thought his son worthy of their shared name.

“And if there is one truth of my own I might offer you, it is that denying what you are will only leave in you in pieces in the end.” With bowed head, Ren might have appeared a penitent: only his blazing aura speaks of a man who has torn apart the galaxy for another to remake anew, and would do so again if necessary. “You fought for what you have earned now. I would not see you lose it for something I can aid you in.”

“I got here without the Force,” Hux says, flat and forbidding. “I hardly need it to maintain my position.”

And Ren raises his head, shakes it in a manner almost gentle. “You would not be here if it were not for me.”

“You need me as much as I need you.” For all the sharp goading of the words, Ren only smiles. It is a strange and troubling thing, unforgiving as it is pitying. Hux cannot meet it for long, his neck flushing even as he glances to where his hands now clench tight in his lap. And he scowls at a test failed, one that he had not even known was being conducted.

The silence thickens between them, grows choking and caustic; Hux gives in first, face a rictus of frustration. “When does this lesson begin?” he bites out, and Ren actually chuckles.

“It already has.”

“Please don’t.” Fighting for every last remaining scrap of dignity left to him, Hux forcibly folds his hands together; they tremble in even that stillness, such nervous energy leaving the taste of bitter ozone upon his tongue. “Ren. I could hardly take these sorts of mind games from an actual Jedi Master – let alone the man I used to watch destroy my ship over every perceived slight against his made-up name.”

A strange smile twists those generous lips, as if Ren had it borrowed from another world, another time, another self; the expression is ill-fitting, endearing, as peculiar as the man himself. “My former master always insisted there was one lesson I would never learn,” Ren replies; such calm is a strange expression upon the man Hux had once known as only a Knight of Ren. Then he tilts his head, shadows shifting in loving caress over pale skin. “But then, given he was not alive to see me do so, perhaps he was right.” One hand rises, falls; his lips have curved to bitter smile. “Even when he was wrong.”

A shudder moves through him; though Ren rarely says Snoke’s name, even such casual careless mention invokes memories best left burned to ash. Hux allows his eyes to fall upon his now-opened hands, and keeps his silence. He does not fear Ren. He never has. But there are parts of the man he might never wish to look upon, even when he is the one who has summoned them again to life.

“So,” he says, and his voice comes in the low command of a general both born and bred. “What am I to do here?”

Meditation comes hard to him. While Hux’s mind has always been an ordered and orderly thing, it had not been made to idle; in the long moments of silence his distracted thoughts are of a thousand other things he might be doing. In low monotone Ren speaks of clearing away such extraneous noise, of how a mind so naturally methodical should be easy enough to command. But then, Ren himself ought to know that Hux’s mind is no easy thing. He has never been able to break it.

It should almost be funny when Ren snaps, voice the rising intonation of pure frustration. “Why can’t you just _turn off_?”

Though his eyes are closed, Hux still glares daggers, twisting them so they will bleed deeper. “Because, for all you might believe otherwise, I am not a droid.”

 _I am the Emperor_.

With a sigh, Ren ends their communion with a Force that Hux can barely stand to name, and then begins the lesson itself. Even before Hux opens his eyes his spine has grown stiff, fingers folded to claws where his hands rest upon the taut muscle of his thighs.

He can spare some gratitude for the fact Ren does not use this time to pontificate upon the metaphysical. Still, the manner in which he does choose to teach might actually be worse. A child’s toys are placed in his hands: little colourful balls, their shiny surface pliant and soft. Ren can make them dance upon the air. Hux can barely flick them to rolling across the floor. His mind stubbornly rebels, hands clenched to fists as he glares at the things and wills them to move by the impossibility of thought alone.

“Why am I even _doing_ this?” he explodes, after what feels the thirtieth attempt brings no result. Ren, cross-legged and straight-backed before him, draws a slow breath.

“Because it’s yours.” And he smiles, as if that could make any of this better. “Because it’s _you_.”

His skin prickles as though ice crystallises beneath its surface, sharp-edged and freezing. “I am who I am.”

Any warmth in Ren’s stance evaporates, head turning, eyes narrowed. The balls roll to rough halt between them, trembling and taut. “I did not slay my master to be the equal of a petty bureaucrat, Hux.”

The balls scatter to all corners, bounce back with fierce _twang_. Hux pays them no heed, eyes fixed upon Ren alone. “If that is what you think of me, then leave. Get out.”

But Ren only leans back upon his backside, eyes narrowed, gaze as speculative as it is scornful. “Are you done with me so soon, then?” He chuckles, the low rumble of uneasy volcanic shift. “Who will you send out as your vengeful Hand across the galaxy, if I leave you now?”

His hands curl to fists upon his knees, lips twisted to ugly sneer. “You cannot master me, Ren,” he hisses, leaning forward, words vicious upon his silvered tongue. “I am your _Emperor_.”

Yet Ren is unmoved, dark and still before him. “If not for me,” he says, conversational and careless, “then you would be dead before Snoke’s throne, already forgotten, already irrelevant. Nothing but the bitter memory of a man who killed billions and yet could not accept the truth of his one self.”

“But I would be beyond this kriffing idiocy!” Lurching forward, hands fisted on the cold floor beneath him, Hux comes too close by half. He can’t bring himself to give a damn. “Your life might have been controlled by this damn thing, ruined and torn, but mine does not have to be,” he snarls. “I don’t want it. I deny it. I won’t do it.”

Ren is unmoved. “We are bound together.” The disgust is as clear as that damnable desire that has been the thrumming undercurrent of their partnership for as long as it has existed. And he smiles, again, bitter and biting. “As long as I am near, then you will never be free.”

For the first time Hux realises he is upon hands and knees before the other man, back arched, chest rising and falling in fierce panting breath. Pushing to his feet, nails dug deep into his palms, he throws out his words with all the force of blaster shot. “Then go.” One hand rises, thrusts out towards the door; it trembles in pained response, the metal whining and fatigued. “Get out of my sight.” His chin is high, eyes black-blue. “I never want to see you again.”

Ren takes to his feet with fluid grace, the easy slide of shadows over cold ice. “Your Empire will fall without me.”

“You’re a pet, Ren – not a prophet.”

He has made a mistake. Ren’s eyes have turned black, utterly devoid of even the bright light of Hux’s chambers. But he turns, says not a word as he moves to the door. The mistake has been made, and Hux knows he should call him back before their shared stubbornness renders it irreparable.

Hux does not. He retreats to his bed instead, burying himself deep in the ridiculous opulence of an emperor’s trappings. But there is no sleep to be found. With the robe tightly enfolded about his narrow body, lean and hardened like leather cured in fierce desert heat, Hux rise to take up his datapad, to turn on the screens scattered about his worktable. He had not clawed his way to such position to rest upon his laurels. There is always more work to be done.

And yet, for the longest moment, he stares only at the great viewport installed above his desk. It is no window. It is a projection of the view from _Finalizer_ ’s bridge: a portal into the stars, and far beyond. Hux remains there for longer than intended. It doesn’t matter. He is emperor. He can have this. It is his, alone.

 _Alone_.

 

*****

 

He expects to hear at any moment that Ren has broken atmosphere, leaving Coruscant far behind. The thought brings more anger than fear, though already Hux calculates what the loss of the Hand will do to his administration. Few would miss Ren for himself. But he represents the old ways, is something beyond simple comprehension – and beyond value to Hux’s fledgling government, stretched thin as it currently is.

While Hux has gathered an aura of mystique quite his own, his apparent mastery over Kylo Ren lends him a kind of preternatural gravitas he could not have garnered by any other method. If the galaxy becomes aware that they have parted ways, it will be perceived only as a failing. Ren had been an instrumental part of Hux’s rise to power. And while Ren even now stands outside the politics of the new Empire, the loss of his faith could not help but fuel unwelcome speculation, feed vicious rumour.

As the night wears on into grey dawning morning, no word of him arrives. That does not matter. It has never mattered. Hux can feel him yet, even at this distance. Ren has not taken to sleep any more than Hux himself has. Instead, he has fallen to old habits: exhausting himself with lightsaber to hand, locked in fierce battle against demons unseen in one of the great private training rooms Hux had gifted him at the beginning of his reign.

Without thought Hux rises from his stiff-backed recline upon his bed. He spares time enough only for greatcoat and boots, casting the former over the soft sleeping pants he had worn to bed. There is no-one but his personal guard to see him in such a state of dishabille. They do not care. They exist only for protection, and then only as he wills it. Hux’s life is otherwise his own.

But then, it is not. Hux can feel him. He can always feel him. And he will not sleep for the fury and the frustration of it, both now driving him to the wing given over to the Emperor’s dark Hand.

There are no locks that can separate them now. Hux lurks within the opened door, silent in his regard as he casts his eye over the swathe of destruction Ren has already left behind. It amazes him that the training room has not already fallen down around them, but he senses no care from the other man. Ren is become a blur of raging black, barely visible amongst his favoured shadows.

But Hux can see him clearly. He has watched him like this before, and for hours at that. In such observation Hux finds a meditative state, even when it has always been so difficult to seek the same under other circumstance. But he does not linger now. In silence and with steady gait, now barefoot, Hux walks out into the fray that Ren fights alone.

Perhaps it makes him a fool. Hux cannot bring himself to care. About him Ren twists in raging trajectory, a comet pulled wildly out of orbit; Hux moves to the centre of the room, each step military-tight and unerring, eyes fixed on nothing but the open space before him.

And there, at the heart of the storm, Hux stops dead. Ren, in slow echo, mirrors the movement – and his blade bridges the space between them, spitting crimson fire, as blinding as the sun that Starkiller had drunk deep of. Hux smiles, a cold blade of his own, unsheathed and made ready for battle.

Ren’s smile is a bloody thing, teeth glittering in the light of his saber, eyes wide with the madness that is his wild heart. It had been the same, up on the ruined throne that they’d taken together. That they had taken _each other_ upon: a fierce connection forged in the crucible of a war already won, the relief of communion between a non-believer and the strongest of its adherents. Though Hux cared little enough for carnal pleasure, he’d given himself over to the power Ren offered, up there in the ruin of Snoke’s fallen Order. But still, when it was over and the world had become very still, Hux had pulled himself from Ren’s arms. He’d not looked back once, but still he’d known the betrayal in those dark eyes. And yet he had risen, wordless, and then walked away from what they’d made there together.

Even then he had known he could not run from it. Not always. It is alive again now, in his blood. In his soul. And still Hux smiles, standing here before the trembling contained fury of Kylo Ren. He has no fear of falling. Not when he had already jumped long ago.

“Fight me.”

The answering snarl is as bloodied and bright as the blade of his cursed saber. “And what have _you_ to fight me with? What makes you worthy of what you do not even understand?”

“I am the Emperor.” Hux opens his arms, chest bared and vulnerable as the greatcoat slips from narrow shoulders. “And I will fight you with everything that I am.”

His laughter rings about the room, alien and grating. “Liar.”

“Try me.”

Ren does not move from his place, though the saber slips down to a low hold at his side. That is acceptance enough. Taking the greatcoat in one hand, Hux crosses the room again, casts it over the racks. Only then does he make his selection: a durasteel training saber that lies heavy in his hands, unfamiliar and unpractised. Though officer’s training had demanded that recruits learn to wield all weapons, actual combat yielded little opportunity for such an artefact, one both ceremonial and calculating.

But there is something of ancient ceremony in this, as Hux turns back to the lurking, hulking mass that is Kylo Ren. He is favoured by his shadows, darkness wound about him in loving shroud, so he might barely be seen. But Hux knows where he is. He always knows where he is.

And yet even as he levels the training blade before his opponent, Hux’s free hand moves of its own will: thrust out to the side, to the unseen sky. The bulbs of the dimmed lights first flare, fluorescing bright and fierce; the room is bathed in perfect brilliant white, the precise clinical negative of all that came before. And then, before they can dim to anything like normality, Hux strikes first.

He knows he cannot be any true match for one trained to this from childhood. Hux had been born a soldier; Ren has been forged a warrior, and in his blood runs the legacy of royal blood and bone. The arching downward strike of Hux’s blade is easily blocked; the force of it judders up his arm, fingers briefly numbed, shoulders frozen in sudden shock. But then he is pulling back, quick upon his feet. It is almost too simple to twist around, to take Ren’s spinning blow, hard and harsh as it is and this is not a game.

But then, Hux had not wanted it to be. Every time they meet, sparks are birthed, bleeding and blinding as crimson plasma skitters across hard metal. For all Hux does not, can not back down, Ren forces him across the room in relentless pursuit. Hux has always played the long game, but the fury in Ren’s eyes says his moves will be taken hard and fast, and he will not lose this victory to an opponent so unexpected.

The sneer upon Hux’s lips burns; so much for the meeting of equals. But it is not over yet. His rage is as hot as the burn of sparking plasma on his skin, crawling and corroding. Any pain is ignored, made irrelevant by the scarlet flare of Ren’s eyes, red light arching sharp across the darkness. Starkiller’s shot had speared harsh through the galaxy in the same such fashion, rendering time and space imperfect and unnecessary, pure logic destroyed by the sheer beauty of a fivefold killing stroke.

Given his lack of comparable brute strength, only Hux’s regulated footwork keeps him upright; it can be but only fitting that when it betrays him, one bare foot caught upon some vagrancy of flooring, that Hux goes down. Ren towers above him, face in rictus mask, eyes black and crimson both as the lightsaber levels at the fierce pulsing swallow of Hux’s throat. It sets the air about it ablaze, makes it hard to breathe: hot and dry, oxygen-weak air rasping as he gasps it in, and fails.

“Yield.”

One after the other, high above them both, the lights flare once more: then, they simultaneously burst in shattering screeching arc. Brow furrowing, Ren glances up, just a moment. It is enough. Only one light remains, and it is all Hux needs to see his quarry – and his victory.

He does not truly know what it is that he does. It does not matter. With a raging shout Hux rises, takes him low, shoulder driving into his solar plexus. Ren concertinas, crumples in upon himself, fallen backward. When he hits the floor he is splayed open, Hux’s weight upon his hips. With arms thrown cruciform, Ren’s saber skitters across the floor; his wrists are pressed hard to the floor though Hux’s right hand is about his throat, the left still clutching his sword. But that is not what holds him down. That is not what holds him still.

It is the Force that holds Kylo Ren at his mercy.

And already Ren laughs, eyes bright-dark and lips red with blood as they stretch wide. “But then,” he whispers, dark delight, “I always have been.”

Already Hux’s tongue burns with some sneered response. But Ren’s smile matches the wonder of his eyes – and when Hux looks to the shadows that arch and tower around them, he sees for the first time what he has done. Shattered transparisteel glitters upon the floor in scattered discrete galaxies, and around the training room: everything not bolted to the floor has risen, floating upon the air in careless orbit of them both as if gravity no longer matters.

“Yes,” Ren sighs, a post-coital release of breath and tension alike, the bright pleasure of it lazy and lovely. “It’s power, Hux.” His eyes are dark and black and yet somehow even here they are still filled with stars. “And it’s _yours_ , now.”

He has stilled. Staring into Ren’s eyes now reminds him of standing upon the helm of the _Finalizer_ , the galaxy spread open before him, waiting for his command. And the power that flows through him now is as new as it is old: undammed, unrelenting, unwanted. “No,” he whispers, even as his soul screams out for what it desires most.

And the narrow hips beneath his buck upward, the hard length of him as sudden as it is inevitable. “ _Yes_.”

“It’s not mine.” But already Hux’s own hips have begun to move in echoing response, heat coiled low in his belly. “It’s not _me_.”

“Surrender to it now,” Ren whispers, “and you will always be free.”

There’s both fury and wonder in the motion, when Hux presses the dull blade against the cruel clear vulnerability of a bared throat. “Is that what _you_ did?”

Ren says nothing, by mouth or in mind. It doesn’t matter. Hux hears it anyway. Everything falls, scattering; the training blade is cast aside as their lips come together. The taste of him, brilliant in remembrance, is the rich pleasure of returning home.

With knees pressed to hips, Hux arches over him. Already one overlarge hand shoves at his trousers, pressing them down over hips; sweat stings his eyes in sudden burn, salt-sharp and alive. His own hands are fisted in Ren’s hair as he devours Ren’s lips, tongue thrust in, seeking out the taste of blood and life.

And the sense of _relief_ – of something missing, now found. As if he has been stumbling in the darkness of deep space, a starchart brilliant and gleaming given over to his mind. Opened and gasping and desperate for _more_.

Ren’s hand moves, shoving his own pants down enough that the hard length of his cock is freed. Hux has but the faintest memory of it; the weight and heat in his hand now is nothing compared to the furnace that had been Ren’s body that first time, clenching about his own hard flesh as they had twined together upon Snoke’s bloodied throne. But there are no thrones here: only his weapon, now discarded as he reaches down, mirroring Ren’s movement, long fingers tangling with the callused length of his own.

There, with cocks fisted together, they begin to move with frank purpose. Every shift comes harsh, his breath fire in his lungs, muscles burning with acid and aching with every stretch. Still Hux takes strange calm from such action. Perhaps it is what he finds in Ren’s eyes: dark and open, staring and startling. When last they had come together like this, Hux had felt the tremor of his great body against his own; it had subsided beneath his touch, his demanding kiss. Only when they had been naked against one another had Ren quietened entirely, the scent of blood strong as Hux had shifted, the slide of one body into the other – even as their minds met in some other time, some other place.

But his own soul slows even as his heart beats quicker. He has always loved the vastness of deep space. But only now does he come to realise it is not the stars he desires most.

“Kylo,” he whispers. And Ren cannot but smile in return, voice almost soundless but lips clear about that one word.

“ _Brendol_.”

And he closes his eyes, breathes a shuddering breath; his hand, slick with them both, stutters over these last strokes. “I can’t call you Master.” Hux turns his face upward, breathless and unbroken, to the last of the light above. “Not when I am your Emperor.”

Ren’s head presses to the space between jaw and shoulder, lips warm where his teeth press soft. “Perhaps, here, in this place,” he says in the voice of a dreamer, “we need no names at all.”

Hux chuckles, humourless and yet somehow content. “Perhaps.”

And then there are no more words: only the motion of bodies, and the meeting of minds finally come to truce. They had both always been made for war. But in this, at least, an ally found might never be lost.

And perhaps, here, cradled together in the Force: they have both already won.

 

*****

 

ETA: THE ART HAS LANDED and here it is: a small comic of part of this ending scene, so I put it down the end here so it can be fully enjoyed. And by _god_ I can assure you that I enjoy it; I wrote this particular story as a pinch hit to [@schaloime](http://schaloime.tumblr.com)'s specifications, which were "emperor!Hux" and "Force-sensitive!Hux" (at least, that's what I went for from the list), and I was incredibly nervous about the whole thing. But after seeing the art...by god. I'm going to gush my guts out over it when it's on tumblr, but suffice it to say: the flow of this is incredible. It really takes the scene and gives it such _life_ , and I am so damned happy to be associated with the art. It really transcends the fic and I just can't say enough about it. Although I will. But man. Do let the artist know how amazing this is BECAUSE IT'S AMAZING. <3 I am just so damn glad we got paired up for this.

 Art by [@schaloime](http://schaloime.tumblr.com/tagged/myArt); please tell her how damn awesome this is!

 


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